Tweaking Monster
My email inbox gets spammed with all kinds of stuff – a lot of which is my fault. Anywho, I got one of those emails from Monster.co.uk, telling me about all the latest IT jobs that were available – none of which matched, because it was an out of date C.V. So I decided to update my profile. And that’s where it started to go downhill, which leads to the scope of this article. Upon trying to update my information, from my blank profile (assuming they updated their structure a while ago), I quickly came across some rather confusing aspects of their form design. I once read an article on UXmatters.com about label placement in forms and how significant it can be. On smaller forms which I tend to write this doesn’t seem important, as there isn’t really much scanning of the page. However, their points became so much clearer when filling out the Monster profile section. Scanning this form seemed not-straightforward, not only due to label placement, but also largely due to field placement.
I had several issues with the first form. It goes in order, ‘first name’, then your’ last name’. So when it gets to ‘Most Recent Employer’ and then has the field ‘Website’ next to it, is that the employer’s website, or your own? It’s not exactly clear, but why would they ask for the company’s website? They’re actually asking for your own. Simple solution, rename the label ‘Your Website’. My other issue with this section is the ‘Career Status’ drop down menu. The three options are ‘Actively looking for a job’, ‘open to new opportunities’ and ‘exploring careers.’ The meaning of these isn’t abundantly clear until you click the little question mark above the form section. Why not just have a little tooltip when the field becomes active?
The next part of the profile form is your address. It has the fields ‘Address 1’ and ‘Address 2’ side by side. When you write an address, each line is always underneath one another, so I instantly assumed it meant a second address (which I’ve seen on many application type forms). Simple solution, change the field name to ‘Address line 1’ and place ‘Address line 2’ underneath it. As for the location, why is it in this day and age of the web, can the backend not deduce the town and county from the postcode?
